Interzone 257

Columns in this issue include an appreciation of Iris Murdoch's writing by Nina Allan, plus interviews with Aliya Whitely and Helen Marshall. Notable reviews include Paul Sussman's first but previously unpublished novel, The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix. I am a fan of Sussman's archaeological mysteries, two of which I have reviewed in this blog, but he only published four before his death at the age of 45. Judging by the review, his first effort was set aside for a reason; it was a different kind of story, and perhaps too ambitious. The DVD reviews include Continuum, which got me all excited that the third season of the excellent Canadian time-travel series had made it across the Pond at last, but sadly not yet – it's an entirely unrelated movie (also about time travel) which attracted only a lukewarm review.

Now to the stories:

A Murmuration by Alastair Reynolds, illustrated by Wayne Haag. An ornithologist living in a remote observatory is working on a mathematical analysis of the movements within a "murmuration"; a great cloud of starlings which gather every day and form sweeping patterns. He is trying to gain approval from a scientific journal to publish his article describing the results, while simultaneously acting as a professional referee to another article submitted to the journal. As his involvement with the murmuration increases, it gradually becomes clear that his grasp of reality is not entirely firm.

Songbird by Fadzlishah Johanabas, illustrated by Vincent Sammy. A young woman is held against her will, drugged  and compelled to sing. Her songs change the nature of a liquid so that when others drink it, they experience a range of strong emotions – depending on the nature of the song. Her captors make a good living selling the drugs she produces, but she is struggling to find a way to escape them.

Brainwhales are Stoners, Too by Rich Larson, illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe. An adolescent couple break into a ThinkTank to see a Brainwhale; a whale which is wired into IT systems to make use of the computational power of its huge brain. One of them gets a lot closer to the whale than she ever expected.

The Worshipful Company of Milliners by Tendai Huchu, illustrated by Richard Wagner. Where do ideas come from? Invisible hats, of course, made by feline creatures who are themselves invisible to humans, and whose lives are spent in manufacturing hats for those people who have need of them.

Blossoms Falling Down by Aliya Whitely, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A close examination of an episode in the life of a woman in a Haiku Room, where people go to hear appropriate haikus for their concerns. It gradually becomes evident that this is just one of the varied entertainments provided in a vast generation ship on an endless journey.

I enjoyed this group of stories. While there is no humour in them this time, they are all intriguing and are very different from each other. It is unusual for a well-established novelist to contribute a story and I particularly liked A Murmuration, the kind of tale which has you wanting to read it again in the light of the conclusion. Which reminds me that I while I read several novels by Reynolds a long time ago, I have had a couple of unread ones sitting in my pile for ages; I really must dig them out.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Following my marathon slog through the author's turgid Last and First Men a couple of weeks ago I girded up my loins, gritted my teeth and picked up Star Maker (published in 1937) with considerable apprehension. Be warned, there are spoilers in this review.

An unnamed man, living on a contemporary Earth, has a vision in which he finds his disembodied self speeding away from our planet and into the depths of the galaxy. The story consists of what he discovers there, could up to the ultimate revelation of the origin and purpose of the Universe; Stapledon can never be accused of lack of ambition in his writing!

Initially, the man finds an "Other Earth" in a far-distant star system, on which there are more or less humanoid inhabitants living in a society at a comparable level to Earth's. He spends several subjective years there, seeing the world through the eyes of the people. A key difference is that for them, taste and scent are much stronger senses than sight, which has some interesting social implications. The author holds up a mirror to the Earth by describing some of the more ridiculous or depressing trends in a society which is like Earth's only more so, including parodying the emphasis on religious differences (he obviously has little sympathy with religion, which caused some controversy at the time). In this part he is following a similar path to that of Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, only in a less exaggerated form and without the humour.

The protagonist is able to join minds with one of the natives, and the pair of them set off on a mental tour of the galaxy, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations (to borrow a phrase). These they find, in vast numbers and with a wide variety in the nature of their inhabitants, and they add other minds to their group as they travel. Millions of years pass and civilisations rise and mostly fall again with depressing frequency.  Those which survive for long enough may develop a "communal world mind", with every individual contributing telepathically to such "wakened worlds". Utopian civilisations often result, based on communism and eugenics – popular and respectable ideas in the 1930s, rather less so today. 

As civilisations continue to develop, they learn how to move planets, creating artificial suns to orbit around them in order to maintain life, and they make artificial planets consisting of concentric spheres with people living on many different levels within them (readers may recognise here ideas used by Larry Niven and Iain M Banks, among others). There are devastating wars between wakened worlds until telepathic powers become strong enough to bind them together over interstellar, and eventually galactic, distances, such telepathic unions enabling a far greater understanding of life, the universe and all that, than individual minds can achieve. The scale of the story becomes ever-greater as it proceeds to the climax – the identification of the Star Maker, the creator of the universe, followed by long descriptions of his works.

In contrast with Last and First Men, at least this one has a kind of plot and a protagonist who tells the tale in the first person, and the description of the Other Earth is entertaining. However, as the story progresses it becomes increasingly metaphysical and remote from any kind of human experience, and I must confess to doing some skim-reading as I approached the end to get to the conclusion as soon as possible. Like Stapledon's earlier work, Star Maker is packed full of interesting and original ideas which must have inspired many SF writers, but this is frankly a terrible novel in terms of engaging the reader and is only worth ploughing through for its historical interest.

Film: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

I have more or less kept up with the X-Men films (barring the odd offshoot) as it is one of the better fantasy series of recent times, so I ordered the DVD as soon as it became available. What follows has some minor spoilers so, if you insist on every development coming as a surprise (in which case, why read reviews?) you had better stop now – I'll just say that it's definitely worth seeing.

I found the start rather confusing because I had formed the impression beforehand that it was the sequel to X-Men: First Class, which was set in the 1960s; probably because of the advertised presence of Jennifer Lawrence rather than Rebecca Romijn as Mystique.  However, the beginning consists of a series of savage combats set in a bleak future world wrecked by warfare, in which the X-Men have been hunted to near-extinction by the Sentinels, artificial humanoids specifically designed to detect and kill them. The few survivors, including an aged Professor X and Magneto working together, had deduced that the war was started by one act in 1973 – the killing by Mystique of Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the creator of the Sentinels. There is just one chance of changing history – so the time-shifting talent of one of the X-Men is used to send the mind of Wolverine back to inhabit his body in 1973, to try to prevent the assassination.

What follows is a race against time as Wolverine, now in 1973, tries to recruit the help of reluctant younger versions of Professor X and Magneto in finding Mystique and dissuading her from killing Trask, before the Sentinels in the future locate the last X-Men and destroy Wolverine's unconscious body. Of course that isn't simple and a series of complications ratchets up the tension, with some great set-pieces leading up to the climax.

The mood is darker than I recall from the previous films, but the plot is more focused and the dramatic pacing is very good. All in all, this film more than maintains the standard of the others. It was good to see Famke Janssen again, albeit briefly, but I still much prefer Rebecca Romijn's version of Mystique!

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

When the Classic SF discussion group chose Stapledon's second novel, Star Maker, as a book of the month, I decided to warm up by tackling his first one, Last and First Men. This title has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember and the book is acknowledged as one of the classics of SF, but for some reason I'd never read it (or about it) so at the start I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be not so much a warm-up as a full-on marathon.

The story is effectively a future history of mankind on Earth, as told by one of the Last Men from billions of years in the future, who is able to relay the story to a present-day man (one of the First Men, naturally). And it reads like a history book, of the summary overview type – as it has to be considering the scope of the work. Barring one scene, there is nothing in the way of dialogue, no characters and no plot: just a massive, three-hundred page infodump. Nonetheless, there was enough of interest in it for me to finish, albeit somewhat exhausted and in need of a lie-down with a damp towel on my forehead. The description which follows includes some spoilers.

The most important point about this book is the date of publication: 1930. For the time, the themes covered in the book were radical and it caused something of a sensation, as did the scope of the work, with civilisation after civilisation rising and falling over billions of years. Some of the elements he includes are relevant today: an example from the early part of the book is the growth in power of transnational commercial organisations at the expense of national governments (a popular theme in SF ever since).  Later on, with the Third Men, a philosophy which reverences all life becomes popular. In contrast with this, a major theme in the latter part of the book becomes the genetic engineering (not that it's called that, of course) not just of plants and animals but of humans too. At first the purpose is to eliminate genetic ailments and extend life, but subsequently this switches to improving the stock (something taken to extremes with the Fourth Men) or even to convert humanity to different environments such as living in the sea or the air. The ultimate developments are mental rather than physical, with the creation of "group minds" through telepathy.

The author deserves credit for his detailed description of an alien life form which is radically different not just from humans but from the kind of animal life we are familiar with. I was also pleased to see that he identified a significant problem with rebuilding civilisation after its first great collapse: that all of the readily available minerals which made the first Industrial Revolution possible were worked out, so humanity had to find other routes to developing civilisation. In this story these were overcome, humanity ultimately terraforming other planets in the Solar System after life on Earth becomes untenable. One social development he mentions is that of group marriage, subsequently developed by Heinlein.

This does not mean that the author was some kind of prophet; his history of the rest of the 20^th century is wildly,  almost comically, inaccurate. Nothing dates the book so much as its reference to the Swastika along with the Cross as being a sacred religious emblem; well, so it was – for another couple of years or so after the book's publication (the fact that the Nazi version was orientated the other way doesn't blunt the point).

The story is a straight-faced account, with the exception of the only scene with dialogue (which includes some wry humour) and one joke which runs through the early part of the book. Stapledon was English, and he includes a dialect saying which can still be heard today: "God help us", used to express ironic exasperation at a turn of events and always said with a broad accent as "Gawd 'elp us" to emphasise the comic intent. In the story, this saying is misunderstood by non-English listeners, with the result that for generations to come the Supreme Being is called "Gordelpus".

Was it worth the time and effort to read? Yes, I suppose so, for its historic relevance to SF, and for the grand scope and ambition of the work. But I don't expect to read it ever again!